'Drag 'Em': How Movement Shaped The Music Of Mary Lou Williams
This essay has been excerpted from the forthcoming book Liner Notes For The Revolution: Black Feminist Sound Cultures by Daphne A. Brooks, which will be published by Harvard UP in 2020.
The genius jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams once said, "I get my inspiration from modern things." According to the writer Farah Jasmine Griffin, Williams counted the New York City subway as one of her artistic incubators, where "musical ideas and sounds" were "delivered" to her while in motion. She was known, by the time she had reached her thirties and achieved great prominence and influence in the 1940s Harlem jazz world, as the kind of daringly spontaneous artist who could emerge from the underground, "arriv[ing] at the club 'with the complete arrangement worked out,'" resulting in a train anthem like "8th Avenue Express" to rival the Duke's love letter to public transportation.
Out on the dirt roads between Memphis and Oklahoma City, other forms of "modern" transport animated Williams' craft at a much earlier age and in a drastically different place, as she traveled with her mother-in-law and friend from one set of gigs to the next, as she would innovate and ride the wave of swing and the boogie woogie next big thing with her then band Andy Kirk and the Dark Clouds of Joy. What did it mean for Williams to "roll" from one blood red state to the next at one of the crucial, early moments in her career as an avant-garde jazz pianist who moved from innovating swing to bebop to orchestral experimentalism? More to the point, how did that movement perhaps inform and shape her experimental philosophies about music making, a subject she would explore in her written work and interviews at various points in her career?
Mary Lou Williams was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in 1910 in Atlanta, Ga. but raised in Pittsburgh, where she showed signs of singular, "clairvoyant" musical talent as a toddler laying down rhythms on the family's reed organ while accompanying her mother, rolling as a tween with her loving stepfather to juke joints where she studied the moves of Lovie Austin and Ma Rainey, revealing her gift of perfect pitch by high school and taking to the Chitlin' Circuit by her teens. From her earliest years, Williams was on the move, independent, "alone but not lonely," as Griffin
